Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty, the American philosopher and social critic who died on Friday aged 75, was a highly influential figure in what came to be known as "postmodernism".

To his admirers and disciples Rorty was "the most interesting philosopher in the world today" and "one of the most provocative and influential thinkers of our time".

But his views did not want for opposition. Rorty himself wrote, for his own entry in the Penguin Reference Dictionary of Philosophy: "Although frequently accused of raving irrationalism and unconscionable frivolity by the political Right, and of insufficient radicalism, as well as premature anti-Communism, by the political Left, I think of myself as sharing John Dewey's political attitudes and hopes, as well as his pragmatism."

He was certainly unusual among philosophers in being widely read outside his own discipline. In part this may have been because he advised students that they need not bother reading Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel or, indeed, much of the rest of 3,000 years' worth of accumulated philosophical wisdom. Instead Rorty argued for a moderated form of pragmatism derived from the ideas of Nietzsche, William James and, above all, Dewey.

The central plank of Rorty's thinking was laid out in his most influential book, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), though his scepticism about epistemology (questions about what we know) and external truth had caused a stir when they were first raised in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 10 years earlier.

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Rorty distinguished between the "metaphysician" - which in his description included all those absorbed by the questions of traditional philosophy - and the "ironist", his preferred philosophical hero.

(Or, rather, heroine, for he adopted the now-fashionable academic practice of using "she" as a neuter pronoun when writing of ironists. A metaphysician remained "he", however, perhaps to emphasise his wrongness.)

The two positions were separated by their "final vocabulary", words such as "true"; "right"; "good" and "beautiful" (and, at a lower level, terms such as "professional standards"; "decency"; "kindness"; "Christ"; "England"; "creative"; "the Revolution" and so on) which were as far as people could go in using language to justify their beliefs, actions and ambitions.

Ironists are distinguished from metaphysicians, in Rorty's view, by their distrust of such vocabularies, because they are aware of completing vocabularies, and by the fact that the existence of the vocabulary does nothing to shore up such doubts.

In addition, the ironist does not believe that her vocabulary is better than anyone else's, nor that it corresponds to any external truth.

Ironists are thus those for whom nothing has an intrinsic nature, a real essence, and for whom the history and naming of a term are descriptive; metaphysicians are those who attempt to use common sense and philosophical tools, such as the Socratic method, to take the question "What is the intrinsic nature of (eg, justice, science, knowledge, Being, faith, morality, philosophy)?" at face value.

Metaphysicians divide libraries according to disciplines, assigning Pythagoras, Plato, Goethe, Kant, Darwin and Freud to mathematics, literature, science, philosophy and so on. Ironists see them as divided according to traditions, and are distrustful of genres.

Naturally, this went down badly with philosophers in the rigorous Anglo-American analytic tradition, and even some in the Continental schools.

Equally naturally, it was tremendously popular among social scientists, English Literature departments, film-makers, architects and all those who distrusted unifying theories.

Rorty's arguments began to be regarded as one of the central intellectual pillars for postmodernism, a doctrine sceptical of doctrines, which dismissed the possibility and desirability of intellectual pillars; The Fontana Postmodernism Reader simply called him "America's most eminent philosopher".

Conservative opponents accused him of being cycnical, nihilistic and irresponsible. "Anyone who says there is no objective truth is asking you not to believe him," as Roger Scruton put it. "So don't." The traditional Left was no more sympathetic; the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton denounced Rorty as a bourgeois ironist with a "cavalier" contempt for the masses.

Other objections were frequently raised, for example by those who pointed out that Rorty's relativism disregarded notions such as human rights, a charge he readily accepted, citing Western feminism as incompatible with Islamic cultures.

"I argue that there are no transcendent answers," Rorty said. "Each of us must reach our own conclusions about life, and try to respect the differences among us."

Beliefs, especially moral beliefs, or intuitions, had, by this view, no value in fact.

The equivalent for belief for the ironist are "platitudes" - statements such as, say, "Human beings differ from animals because they have the spark of the divine with them" or "Blacks have no rights which whites are bound to respect" - and when they are surrendered, according to Rorty, "we have made a change rather than discovered a fact".

Richard McKay Rorty was born on October 4 1931 in New York, and grew up there and in New Jersey. His parents, James and Winifred, were active in Socialist, though anti-Stalinist, circles, and encouraged their son to read Trotsky, and to align himself with the trades union movement.

But the young Rorty also had a pronounced aesthetic streak: he was devoted to Proust and collected wild orchids.

By the age of 15, he had already enrolled in a course in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he studied under Rudolph Carnap, and after an MA in 1952, by the age of 24 had completed his PhD at Yale, under the supervision of Paul Weiss, with a dissertation entitled The Concept of Potentiality.

He had begun teaching while still at Yale and, after two years of army service, took up a post at Wellesley College, where he remained until 1961. He then transferred to Princeton, where he was at first regarded as an able, but fairly traditional, analytic philosopher working within the mainstream tradition which had Descartes as its founder.

He began, though, gradually to lose his sympathy for the Anglo-American analytic tradition in which he had been educated, and to turn towards the school of philosophy known as pragmatism, of which Dewey was the leading light.

This he modified with notions drawn from Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, primarily by claiming that "meaning" is a social and linguistic construction which does not correspond with external reality.

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which drew upon and extended the linguistic philosophy of WVO Quine, Rorty argued that the Cartesian demand for certain knowledge was no more than a hangover from the quest for God (a similarly misguided notion). And like God, analytic philosophy was dead, he declared.

Rorty found himself with less and less in common with others in Princeton's philosophy department. "I was getting on my colleagues' nerves, and they were getting on mine," he told The Daily Telegraph in 1999. "But, more important, I was just plain bored. What they were doing didn't interest me, and I didn't see a place for my work in their scheme of things."

In 1982 Rorty handed in his cards at Princeton (where he had had tenure) and took a post as a professor of humanities at the less presitigious University of Virginia, a step which was regarded as eccentric in the extreme by many in American scholarly circles. But he found himself free to write and teach what he really believed.

In Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) he was continuing to cling to a belief in truth, if only in William James's description of it in terms of what is good in the way of belief.

But Rorty soon came to doubt the point of any theory of truth and, under the influence of the philosopher Donald Davidson, rejected any description of truth in relation to other concepts.

The popular success of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity led him to explore Continental philosophy and in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth and Essays on Heidegger and Others (both 1991), he not only advanced defences of Rawls's political theories, but began to incorporate the work of such figures as Foucault and Derrida into his analyses.

He published, in 1998, a survey of the Left in American politics called Achieving our Country, which argued for a progressive pragmatism in the tradition of Dewey, but also drew on emblematic literary figures such as Whitman.

To some extent, Rorty's youthful enthusiasm for Proust informed much of his later work, with his view of the individual as a creator and re-creator of his reality, and in his argument that religion and conventional philosophy ought to give way to a kind of subjective "cultural politics".

Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) presented these arguments to a wider audience.

One of the reasons for Rorty's popularity, and the esteem in which he was held, was his lucidity as a writer; even in technical works for an academic audience, he was at pains to spell out his analyses clearly, and not to duck their consequences. This alone made him stand out from almost all other writers and philosophers who adopted postmodernism.

"I don't consider myself a great thinker, and I never intended to create so much controversy," he said. "I was just doing the kind of work that I found myself doing. I write the things I want to write, and if people find it interesting then that's good."

In 1998 he became Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University in California, a role he kept until his retirement two years ago.

Rorty received a number of academic honours and distinctions, including MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, and gave the Northcliffe Lectures at University College London in 1986 and the Clark Lectures at Trinity, Cambridge, the following year.

He liked bird-watching.

Richard Rorty married in 1954, Amelie Oksenberg, with whom he had a son. They divorced in 1972 and that year he married, secondly, Mary Varney, by whom he had a son and a daughter.